Mike's Notes
Recently, I read the biography of Katlin Karikó, an incredible woman scientist from Hungary who devoted her
entire working life to finding a way to get cells to heal themselves
using their cellular machinery (mRNA, etc.).
"Katalin Karikó has had an unlikely journey. The daughter of a butcher in
postwar communist Hungary, Karikó grew up in an adobe home that lacked
running water, and her family grew their own vegetables. She saw the
wonders of nature all around her and was determined to become a scientist.
That determination eventually brought her to the United States, where she
arrived as a postdoctoral fellow in 1985 with $1,200 sewn into her
toddler’s teddy bear and a dream to remake medicine.
Karikó worked in obscurity, battled cockroaches in a windowless lab,
and faced outright derision and even deportation threats from her bosses
and colleagues. She balked as prestigious research institutions
increasingly conflated science and money. Despite setbacks, she never
wavered in her belief that an ephemeral and underappreciated molecule
called messenger RNA could change the world. Karikó believed that
someday mRNA would transform ordinary cells into tiny factories capable
of producing their own medicines on demand. She sacrificed nearly
everything for this dream, but the obstacles she faced only motivated
her, and eventually she succeeded.
Karikó’s three-decade-long investigation into mRNA would lead to a
staggering achievement: vaccines that protected millions of people from
the most dire consequences of COVID-19. These vaccines are just the
beginning of mRNA’s potential. Today, the medical community eagerly
awaits more mRNA vaccines—for the flu, HIV, and other emerging
infectious diseases.
Breaking Through isn’t just the story of an extraordinary woman. It’s
an indictment of closed-minded thinking and a testament to one woman’s
commitment to laboring intensely in obscurity—knowing she might never be
recognized in a culture that is driven by prestige, power, and
privilege—because she believed her work would save lives."
Apart from her heroism in the face of overwhelming odds, what struck
me was her description of the lack of decent childcare in the
US, compared to Hungry, as a barrier for women in the workforce.
When I get Ajabbi up and humming, one of the first things I will organise
is to provide free, unlimited, quality childcare so women with kids can
work. All work at Ajabbi needs to be family-friendly.
I am looking for the Katlin's of this world.
The article below is reprinted from Nature and is a book review.
Katlin Karikó
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Against the odds: 12 women who beat bias to succeed in science
By: Georgina Ferry
Nature: 03 March 2025
A book deftly highlights how women have been considered unsuitable as
researchers for reasons other than their ability and commitment.
Against the Odds: Women Pioneers of Science John Gribbin and Mary
Gribbin Icon Books (2025)
What is it with toilets? In domestic households, men and women use the
same ones without a fuss, but at some point in history it became etiquette
for toilets in workplaces to be segregated. And in supposedly male
environments, it meant that there simply weren’t any for women. It then
became absurdly easy to use the lack of appropriate toilets as an excuse
to deny women a role in those environments or, if they did take a job
there, to make their lives difficult.
Toilets come up in several of the 12 stories selected for John and Mary
Gribbin’s gallery of female pioneers in science, Against the Odds. In the
opening years of the twentieth century, physicist Lise Meitner, banished
to a basement because she wasn’t allowed to work in the chemistry
laboratories of what was then the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University of
Berlin, had to use the toilets in a neighbouring restaurant. During the
1950s, computer pioneer Lucy Slater, while developing the operating system
for an early computer at the University of Cambridge, UK, smashed the
sanitary equivalent of a glass ceiling by simply using the men’s toilet
(singing loudly to signal her presence). And in 1964, Vera Rubin became
the first female astronomer who was officially allowed to use the big
telescopes at the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories in California,
overturning a ban that had been partly, but explicitly, based on the lack
of a women’s toilet.
Science trailblazers
Compared with unequal pay for the same work, the reality of men with
fewer qualifications being promoted ahead of them and the frank refusal to
recognize that a married woman with children might be capable of a career,
the toilet issue was probably a trivial annoyance to these women. But it
symbolizes how, for centuries, women have been considered unsuitable as
scientists for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability or
commitment.
The Gribbins’ aim is to “highlight the achievements of women who overcame
the odds and achieved scientific success ... as society changed over about
150 years”. They don’t justify their selection, other than to note that
the women featured (ordered by year of birth) collectively cover the
period. But it is startling that physicist Chien-Shiung Wu is the only
scientist who is not white or born in a Western country (and she spent
most of her career in the United States). The ‘hidden figures’ — African
American women who calculated trajectories for early NASA space missions —
remain hidden. Many girls won’t find a role model who looks like them in
the book.
With that caveat, the Gribbins tell the stories with an adroit mix of
anecdote and exposition. There is a bias towards physical sciences,
perhaps reflecting John Gribbin’s background in astrophysics. Some of
those featured (such as crystallographer Rosalind Franklin) are close to
being household names, others (geophysicists Eunice Newton Foote and Inge
Lehmann) are much less familiar. Three of the women (chemists Irène
Joliot-Curie and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin and geneticist Barbara
McClintock) won Nobel prizes; two (Meitner and Wu) should have done.
Some of the women were less celebrated during their lifetimes. It took
100 years for historians to uncover the work done by Foote, as a wealthy
‘lady amateur’ working in her home lab in New York state. She demonstrated
that water vapour and carbon dioxide absorbed energy from sunlight and so
could increase global temperatures. Her 1856 paper included the statement
that if “the air had mixed with it a larger proportion [of CO2] than at
present, an increased temperature ... would have necessarily resulted”.
Three years later, John Tyndall, unaware of Foote’s work, performed the
experiments that are generally credited with establishing the nature of
the ‘greenhouse effect’.
Equal partners?
Foote was a suffragist and abolitionist who married an equally
enlightened husband, working together at the lab bench. Men have an
important role in these women’s accounts, as enablers or obstructors —
sometimes both. Meitner’s work on radiation involved a decades-long
collaboration with chemist Otto Hahn. The relationship seems to have been
fruitful and harmonious, and Meitner gradually overcame institutional
prejudice to achieve professional recognition. But the advent of Nazism
led her to flee to Stockholm, where she came up with the idea of nuclear
fission in conversation with her nephew Otto Frisch. After correspondence
with Meitner, Hahn confirmed its existence experimentally and he alone was
awarded the chemistry Nobel prize in 1944. Far from insisting — as Pierre
Curie had done for his wife and co-worker Marie — that the prize should be
shared with Meitner, he allowed a narrative to develop that she had been
his assistant, when the opposite was nearer the truth.
As a biographer myself (disclosure — the Gribbins’ chapter on Crowfoot
Hodgkin draws on my book, with attribution), I can’t stress too strongly
the importance of the formative years in determining whether women pursue
scientific careers. German mathematician Emmy Noether was typical of this
group in having highly academic parents — her father was also a
distinguished mathematician — who paid for her to have private tuition in
the subject at the beginning of the twentieth century, when German
universities were not open to women. A rearguard attempt to stop her from
gaining a university position made the extraordinary claim that “a woman
‘is unsuitable for regular instruction of our students because of the
phenomena connected with the female organism’”. Growing up in a family
that says ‘yes you can’ in a society that is still saying ‘no you can’t’
makes all the difference in imparting the sense of agency that fuels a
determination to continue against the odds.
Motherhood might be seen as one of the biggest obstacles, once
institutional sexism has been excluded, although the two cannot be
disentangled completely. In 1923, Leslie Comrie wrote a letter in support
of fellow astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who was a student at the
University of Cambridge, UK, at the time. Payne-Gaposchkin wanted to work
at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in his
letter, Comrie assured the observatory’s director that “she would not want
to run away after a few years training to get married”. She didn’t run
away but, some ten years later, did marry émigré Russian astronomer Sergei
Gaposchkin, and they had three children with no noticeable effect on her
prodigious research output on stellar evolution and the composition of
stars. Payne-Gaposchkin and Crowfoot Hodgkin share the distinction of
having given prestigious public lectures while pregnant (and in Crowfoot
Hodgkin’s case, under her maiden name of Crowfoot).
Half of those featured in the book became mothers; others, such as
Lehmann and McClintock, made a nun-like commitment to science above all
else. Yet they all had a passion for discovering more about the natural
world, and a joy in doing so, that enabled them to overcome all obstacles.
Historians might frown on collections, such as Against the Odds, that put
a spotlight on individuals. But they serve to remind young women who find
it hard to have a scientific career that this has often been the case, and
that hanging on to that quest for joy is worth it in the end.
As noted in Against the Odds, Nobel-prizewinning physicist Richard
Feynman’s sister Joan decided to become an astrophysicist after he gave her
an astronomy textbook containing a graph credited to Payne-Gaposchkin. It
gave her the ammunition she needed to defy her mother and insist that girls
could do physics. The need for such ammunition is less today than it was in
1941, but it hasn’t disappeared.
